Netanyahu argues that October 7th would have happened under any Prime Minister due to systemic failures and other external factors. But a closer look shows these arguments are weaker than they appear. While responsibility is shared, Netanyahu’s long tenure, policy choices, and inconsistent standards of accountability make it difficult to argue that his leadership played no meaningful role.

Benjamin Netanyahu faces the challenge of seeking reelection after presiding over the catastrophic failure of October 7th.

His defense has taken a clear shape. On the one hand, he and his supporters argue that the attack would have happened under any Prime Minister, given the systemic failures involved. On the other, they claim that Israel’s military successes since then demonstrate his uniquely capable leadership.

But how strong are these arguments? This post focuses on the failure of October 7th and the events leading up to it. We will save the management of the war for another time.

The Case for Netanyahu

Before picking it apart, let’s present the strongest version of Netanyahu’s defense:

The intelligence failure was real and staggering. Senior IDF and Shin Bet officials insisted that Hamas was deterred in the weeks leading up to the attack, and that they were more interested in economic stability than in starting a war. Even as suspicious activity mounted on the night of October 6th, they failed to wake the Prime Minister. The people whose job it was to see the threat coming got it catastrophically wrong, and Netanyahu wasn’t even in the room.

Then there’s the comparison to his rivals. Netanyahu points out that Bennett and Lapid ran the same containment policy toward Gaza that he did. His supporters go further, arguing that Bennett specifically bears blame for expanding the number of Gazan workers permitted into Israel, some of whom allegedly fed Hamas intelligence used in the attack. Netanyahu recently published a document containing selective quotes from 2014 security cabinet protocols during Operation Protective Edge, suggesting that he pushed for harsher action against Hamas while Bennett and Liberman blocked him.

Finally, there’s the protest argument. Hamas noticed the 2023 judicial reform crisis. Sinwar watched hundreds of thousands take to the streets. He heard calls for pilots to refuse reserve duty. He read it as weakness and reportedly moved up his timetable. Netanyahu argues the opposition, by inflaming that division, shares responsibility for what followed.

If you find yourself persuaded by any of this, you’re not being naive. The defense has genuine substance. The question is how much of it survives contact with the full record.

Evaluating The Argument

The Intelligence Failure and its Limits

The generals failed. That much is not in dispute. The “conception” that Hamas preferred quiet over conflict was deeply embedded, and it blinded the entire system to what was coming.

So far, so good. But Netanyahu presided over that system for thirteen of the nearly fifteen years before the attack. Choosing the right people, challenging their assumptions, making sure the machine is actually working — that’s the job. A massive and drawn-out failure of the system belongs to the leader on top of the system.

There’s also the question of what would actually have happened had he been woken at in the early hours of October 7th. The relevant question is not whether he could have been woken earlier, but whether that would have meaningfully changed the decision-making process. His generals tell him the activity in Gaza looks like a training exercise. They caution that any early response could compromise intelligence sources. They suggest reconvening at 8 AM. Given Netanyahu’s long record of deferring to these same officials, given his consistent caution about changing the status quo with Hamas, is there any serious reason to think he would have suddenly demanded the kind of aggressive preemptive action that could have stopped the attack?

The Other Prime Minister

Netanyahu’s argument depends heavily on the claim that Bennett’s record on Gaza was no better than his own. That claim deserves scrutiny.

The 2014 Protective Edge document is comprised of individual quotes lifted from hundreds of pages of cabinet protocols and stripped of all context. The fuller record tells a different story. Moshe Yaalon, the Defense Minister at the time, publicly criticized Bennett after that operation for being too reckless, for wanting to strike Hamas’s tunnel network before it had even been used against Israel. And in Netanyahu’s own autobiography, written well before October 7th, he describes himself as the voice of restraint against Bennett’s more aggressive instincts.

During his year as Prime Minister, Bennett’s approach to Gaza was meaningfully different. Unlike Netanyahu, He responded to provocations, including incendiary balloons, with direct strikes on Hamas assets. Gazan protesters were never allowed to approach the security fence. The IDF was instructed to plan the targeted assassination of Hamas leadership, including Sinwar and Deif. Netanyahu inherited the economic incentives meant to lower Hamas’s guard, kept them, and did not revive the assassination plans that had been shelved when Bennett left office.

On the workers: Netanyahu’s governments had permitted thousands of Gazans to enter Israel under trader permits for years before Bennett expanded the quota. When Netanyahu returned to power, he didn’t roll back the expansion. He increased it further, to nearly 20,000. The argument that Bennett uniquely bears responsibility for that policy requires ignoring everything that came before and everything that came after.

And then there’s the basic arithmetic. Bennett was Prime Minister for one year of the fourteen before October 7th. Netanyahu was Prime Minister for the other thirteen. The idea that responsibility is somehow shared equally is incoherent.

Internal Division and Responsibility

Yes, The opposition did, indeed, behave poorly. They were divisive, unaccommodating, and applied rhetoric meant to rile up protesters instead of seeking compromise, and Sinwar did take notice. 

That said, it was the government that drove the process of the judicial reforms in a way that brought the entire political left and center into the streets in real concern for the future of our democracy. The scale of the protests went far beyond the traditional political left, drawing in large parts of the center as well. 

The Government pushed forward with their maximalist reforms and showed no interest in compromise or moderation, despite the growing chaos generated in response and over the explicit warnings of nearly every serious institution in Israeli society, including Netanyahu’s own security chiefs.

Netanyahu’s Double Standard

Even if one accepts parts of Netanyahu’s argument, there is a deeper problem that runs through his entire defense.

When Naftali Bennett was Prime Minister, Netanyahu and his coalition applied a clear and consistent standard. Every terrorist attack was Bennett’s personal responsibility. The blood was on his hands. There was no interest in discussing intelligence failures, institutional cultures, the legacy of previous governments, or the complexity of Gaza policy. He was the Prime Minister. The buck stopped with him.

The largest massacre in Israeli history happened under Netanyahu’s watch. His own campaign materials had spent years promising voters that this kind of catastrophe was impossible under his leadership — that without him, Israel was defenseless, and with him, it was secure. And when it happened anyway, the framework changed completely. Suddenly responsibility was spread across institutions, predecessors, intelligence officials, and an irresponsible opposition.

You don’t need to take a position on any of the specific factual disputes to notice what’s happening here. Netanyahu is asking to be evaluated by a standard he spent years refusing to apply to others.

Is there a reader here who has any doubt how Netanyahu and his coalition would have reacted to such arguments had October 7th happened under Bennett’s watch?

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)